Justin du Coeur

Okay, so here's a new rule: if your website shows panels that automatically starts playing *sound* when it comes up, I'm going to avoid your site like the plague.

I usually have several dozen pages open at a time, in five or six windows. My machine just rebooted, and when I opened Chrome again, I started hearing some stupid news show, with advertisements, playing through the speakers. Of course, it was a tech page that I'd opened days ago and immediately turned off the stupid video program in the sidebar; but when Chrome restarted, so did the video. Took me ten minutes to track down the sound, though -- I don't know of any easy way to ask the question "which browser window is making that racket?"

Bloody annoying. I don't at all mind A/V on the web, but starting without a click is *not* cool...

They don't necessarily just play on startup, either-- I ran into one where a window I'd had open for days to the same page just suddenly started playing audio, and I couldn't figure out why. I've found that going through and refreshing each tab and seeing if there's an interruption in the noise is the quickest way of figuring out where it's coming from, but that really shouldn't be *necessary*.

In Chrome 29 (currently the beta channel), there's a feature where the tabs playing audio show it with some kind of label on the tab. It's currently disabled, but you can turn it on with a command line option: